A Species Apart: Self-Preservation and Political Expedience

Cambodia's "Three Primates"

Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Op-Ed by MP

UNLIKE other breeds of the Ape Species, the ‘Three Primates’ (of the 'Thick Face' variety) appear to represent a species apart and would have baffled Charles Darwin himself in his revolutionary effort to unravel the Origins of Species!

For one thing, in any Ape colony a dominant male cannot hope to remain in power for such a lengthy period of time and inevitably finds himself being forced to relinquish his throne to a younger, upcoming rival.

The Three would have had - one suspects - a certain amount of innocent blood on their hands having risen through the rank of Pol Pot's Eastern Zone command where thousands were slaughtered after having been identified as enemies of Angka.

Pol Pot used the military within a given Zone to purge/execute civilians and former police officers or soldiers. This would have involved full collaboration of non-military and military chains of administration and command from, So Phim (Head of Eastern Zone) downward through District authority (of which, Chea Sim had been Head), all the way to the hamlet Chief.

Pol Pot then used soldiers from other Zones to purge the military within the Eastern Zone itself having identified them as liabilities to Angka vis a vis Vietnam. And it was at this point that the Three Executioners now turned Rebels crossed over the fence into Vietnam.

The rest, as they say is history, but it should be noted that while in Vietnamese captivity, it soon became evident to the captors (through thorough interrogation sessions) that the Three, among other former KR prisoners, would yield immense lasting value and relevance to Vietnam.

Pol Pot had been a disappointment to Hanoi as a former protégé and ally, but in every failure Hanoi always managed to find opportunities with which to sow seeds for future success, and this it certainly achieved by working on, and exploiting to the full, through their secret cells implanted within the DK regime.

In fact, it was Pol Pot's fear of the existence of Vietnamese presence and infiltration in this way that partly explained his decision to evacuate the urban towns and cities in the first place, having also grasped that the movement he now led had originated by virtue of Hanoi's initiatives and remained directly or indirectly under its clandestine influence or direction, and hence, its determination to keep hold of its investment by whichever means.

But, what value were the Three captives now offering to their captors? Well, unsurprisingly, it wasn't the Three's certain involvement in Democratic Kampuchea's mass killings that was uppermost in the captors' minds - that was of little or no interest to them. Having seen that the fruits were ripe for the picking across the border, their prime concern was how to recapture their sister movement which had momentarily been led astray by Pol Pot's and his Paris educated colleagues' erratic charge or leadership.

The fact that the Three had been middle ranked cadres within DK rather than prominent national figures would also have been a factor in their favour as they would now be presented to their own people as 'victims' of Pol Pot's 'madness' and paranoia and who would now appear before them as their saviours and patriots - men who like them, had shared their untold suffering.

Moreover, the Three's own murky past provided both themselves and their Vietnamese patrons with a strong psychological reassurance against the prospect or likelihood of Hanoi's succour and patronage ever becoming redundant for either party. Hanoi’s predatory pursuit of self-interest hinges upon Phnom Penh’s unconditional reciprocation and collaboration in exchange for political self-preservation (under genuine democratic rule, the Three would not have been able to resist being tried for their war crimes as well as complicities in other post-war atrocities), and since self-interest and self-preservation are two sides of the same coin, it is not always obvious where Vietnam’s interest ends and Cambodia’s interest begins.

Adaptability is thought to be integral to ‘natural selection’, but what Man promises through nobility and love of his own kind, he is also capable of ‘disappointing’ through baseness and selfishness of his deeds. The longevity of the Three’s political reign certainly owes more to their deep-seated fear of their own past one day catching up with them than to any acclaimed intellectual grasp of social realities unfolding before them. Indeed, far from living and being in tune with those realities, they begin and end their day denying them: that whilst they are the ones that breed corruption and are its actual embodiments, it is they - and no one else - who could make corruption disappear, and what is more, that if they were to succeed, their Reform agenda would require international financial assistance; that selected KR leaders would be put on trial and be prosecuted, but they - also former KR cadres - would be exempt from any kind of ‘inclusion’ in, or appearance before, the Court; that some border markers are well inside Cambodian territory, but it is the protesting Khmer villagers who must be imprisoned for protesting the prospect of losing their lands; that it was the Vietnamese authorities who relocated their border markers in recognition of their own blatant ‘error’, but it is the ‘malicious’ Opposition who sought to instigate international tension by falsifying demarcation documents ...

These are hardly examples of studied realism; they are desperate acts of desperate men in desperate times who when confronted with the probe of Truth opt to hide behind their cynical capitulation before arising events. That’s what makes them disappointing as actors and men to many of us.

This may spell sad news for the Khmer people, but for this extraordinary Species and their Vietnamese benefactors, it is simply another savage climb up the evolutionary ladder - as Darwin himself might have noted!